4 Sales Management Skills You Should Focus On

A great team is often defined by the kind of leadership that they have. This is especially true in results-driven sales, where teams are in a constant race to reach their quota and close those accounts.

While it can seem helpful to spend most of an organisation’s time and money on training salespeople and enrolling sales managers in leadership and coaching training, that actually doesn’t have the impact that many would think it does.

Coaching seems like a no-brainer when it comes to improving a team, but Jason taught us that that’s not actually the case. Coaching is a vague skill, he says, and there’s a large disparity between sales managers and salespeople when it comes to application. Oftentimes, sales managers believe they’re coaching more often than they actually are.

Additionally, coaching and leadership training doesn’t focus on career important skills, like pipeline management or assessing performance, which leaves sales managers unprepared.

Instead of focusing on coaching, we rounded up four of the skills that Jason mentioned as being critically important in our webinar.

1. Business Acumen

Business Acumen, or business sense, is the most impactful on revenue, even though organisations traditionally rank it as the least important skill. A sales manager with good business acumen has a quick understanding of risks and opportunities within a business and is able to discern which choice will result in the best outcome. Thus, it’s important to focus on risk management and decision making.

2. Assessing Performance

This skill involves a manager being able to quickly tell which salespeople need additional assistance in reaching quota. This is arguably one of the most important jobs that a sales manager has, and it clearly affects quota.

3. Pipeline Management

The sales pipeline refers to an organisation’s leads for the upcoming months and whether the organisation’s leads are growing. To train sales managers for this, make sure they understand how to align the pipeline to the buying process and are able to explain it clearly to their salespeople.

4. Sales Forecasting

Having a developed business sense is very important, as evidenced by two of the skills mentioned tying into that. Forecasting is arguably the “backbone” of a business forecast, so it’s important to focus on skills related to decision making and forecasting profits.

Jason says a great sales manager leads to great sales performance, which translates into an average of a 39% boost in revenue. Even beyond that, 71% of the time, organisations get sales managers through promoting from within.

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